Inside Trump’s scramble to get White South Africans to the US as refugees

Weeks into his second term, President Donald Trump announced that nearly all refugees admitted to the United States would be White South Africans, radically reshaping a decades-long program that had largely serviced people fleeing war, persecution, or other dangers. Eighteen months later, the US has admitted more than 7,700 Afrikaners — but the effort has hit some notable bumps along the way. The refugee program, largely shuttered for the rest of the world, has sparked diplomatic spats, prompted a scramble to open a processing site in South Africa, generated highly unusual requests from applicants and produced high denial rates, due in part to criminal records among some applicants, according to more than a dozen people familiar with the program.